The first thing to do if you want to use Maven is download and install it. The build has been tested with version 1-rc3 so use this or a later version if possible.

One of the main differences between Maven and plain ant is that Maven manages external dependencies for your projects and (at least in theory) you should no longer have to store third-party jar files in your CVS tree. It maintains a local repository of versioned libraries and shares them between your Maven projects. If it can't find the necessary files there it will attempt to download them from the main Maven repository at www.ibiblio.org/maven. So to use the Maven build, you need to have a network connection available for the inital download of the project dependencies (and any others that Maven itself requires).

Once you have Maven installed, building the project should be as simple as typing "maven jar" from the command line. Providing there are no failures in the test suite, this will create the project jar files in the "target" directory. For more information on using Maven, have a look at the Maven web site.